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Federal labor officials have decided to reverse their longtime policy and release diversity numbers for government contractors such as Oracle and Palantir Technologies in response to a lawsuit filed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Reveal submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the workplace statistics of those and other tech companies as part of a project analyzing the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. We requested the companies’ official EEO-1 reports, which show the race and gender numbers for total US employees grouped by broad job categories.
But five companies – Oracle, Palantir, Pandora Media, Gilead Sciences and Splunk – objected to the requests, claiming that the diversity data is a trade secret. In each case, the US Department of Labor initially agreed with the companies and denied Reveal’s FOIA requests.
[...] On Oct. 30, the Labor Department notified the five government contractors that it would disclose their diversity numbers over their objections. Citing the lawsuit, the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs told the companies that it has “undertaken a supplemental review” and “will initiate disclosure.” The companies had until Nov. 19 to take legal action to stop the release of the data.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday November 26 2018, @09:52PM (11 children)
Just now?! Holy shit... When I first came across such an initiative I immediately assumed someone sued for discrimination and the "diversity initiative" was the judge's equivalent of sensitivity training. I can't remember the details but I nailed it and they did indeed get into trouble over the sorts again later.
Oh not at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_World [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @10:34PM
Sometimes it is amazing how blinded people could be to the obvious if they just have some reason not to believe it.
I cant wait until, "Im beginning to believe this climate change thing isnt really that important, the reliability of the data is questionable, the long term predictions are ok but not great vs extrapolating a trend line, and the ideas to 'fix it' are all worthless or even dangerous".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 27 2018, @02:33AM (9 children)
You're not funny, you know. I've been saying since high school that affirmative action and similar programs are aspirin for cancer. You'd rather have the aspirin than nothing, but my fear is that it's making people in charge and with power complacent, or making them think they've "solved racism." No, we have not; we've found one unstable local minimum.
The real solution to the problem of racial disparity has to begin before a child is even born. Poverty, education, safe environment, proper medical care, all of this has to be addressed. I'm quoting a friend almost verbatim here: letting someone into a college they wouldn't otherwise have gotten into at 18 is not going to make up for when they were 8 years old and sick, malnourished, constantly frightened, and living in a broken home.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 27 2018, @03:18AM (1 child)
Bingo!
Even issues that are sometimes described as relating to character are actually the result of racism. Want to know why there was a rise in black Americans with poor impulse control from 1970 to 1990? Look no further than the fact that black people, due to rampant housing discrimination, were and in some cases still are forced to live and work in areas with high lead toxicity, and one of the major effects of lead poisoning is loss of higher brain function. An effort began to start cleaning up the lead, and black Americans steadily became more responsible. It's almost like poisoning people is bad [motherjones.com] or something.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 27 2018, @05:13AM
And yet, we still have people on this very site (Looking at you, VLM, you piece of shit...) who will look right at the data and go "nope, nignogs gonna nig" or even worse. Makes me wonder if a little bit of high-velocity lead poisoning wouldn't be the most merciful option...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @02:28PM (3 children)
Careful there. Add in a focus on ensuring that girls (and boys, because this will help them as well) receive a proper maths education. Throw out teachers--especially womyn-born-womyn teachers who believe a womyn's place is in the kitchen (they will tie feminist philosophy into a pretzel to arrive at that conclusion based on "wombs" or someshit... we both know they're out there, aligned with right-wing Christian conservatives but I suppose we might see some Muslim diversity in this kind of counterrevolutionary "feminism" they practice)--who transmit math phobia to their students.
If we do that, we might just see cisfemale programmers and African-American programmers and Latinx programmers.
So the ruling class must be careful, since the goal of these policies, due to their objective inability to achieve their goals, is clearly to keep womyn in the kitchen and African-Americans and Latinx impoverished.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 27 2018, @03:06PM (2 children)
Fucking log in, Kurenai, we all know it's you. No one else makes every goddamn post ever on the subject of everything her personal stalking horse for blaming every single cisgender woman in the world for what a bunch of shitty TERFs did to her at the Michigan Womyn's Festival. Some women are assholes; huge revelation, no?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @07:58PM (1 child)
So you "real" women have no intention of learning programming. That's wonderful.
You scream about abortion. Then you go and vote Trump. (Or for whoever in Georgia's gubernatorial race.) Then the right to an abortion is suddenly in danger. So you scream louder about abortion. Then you'll go again and vote to make abortion illegal.
One begins to wonder whether your actions (voting to make abortion illegal, refusing to learn programming, etc) might not be more important than your words. I think that you women by and large want abortion illegal and you want to discourage your daughters from becoming interested in programming.
It was fun the first time around the misogynerd narrative. I guess live and learn. Turns out that you women are just gaslighting about all this.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 27 2018, @10:36PM
Sorry, what? I have never voted for a Republican in my life, and actually *can* program in C a bit.
Also, if you say "you women" but are a transwoman, are you saying transwomen aren't women? Because so are the people who did you wrong at the MWMF...and the other people who want you dead.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 27 2018, @02:37PM (2 children)
I wasn't "Ha Ha" kidding. I was disappointed. More so now...
Did you look at Wikipedia article? The exact opposite was shown: Racial affirmative action was actually causing harm to the poor of both groups while only assisting the richest of the minority group. And, at the expense of its own minority rather than the majority.
Saying you can't make up for all that by giving people some money and easing their admission to uni isn't being constructive. You want a real solution? A strict and universal 8hr shift cap across the whole country and a minimum living wage to match. Anyone arguing for less is either being ignorant or is deliberately derailing the discussions by arguing for bad, populist solutions since they don't want to pay more wages and hire more people.
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(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 27 2018, @03:09PM (1 child)
I've thought for a long time now that racism was both proxy for and enabler of class discrimination, that zero-sum thinking is what's at the bottom of most of what appears to be simple racial prejudice. That's not to say racism for its own sake isn't real, but my suspicion is that most ordinary racists have an economic trigger driving them, and cluster around a small but very loud percentage of actual dyed-in-the-wool race haters.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday November 27 2018, @06:43PM
Not necessarily. I'm a zero-sum thinker in most respects but it lends to me concluding racism is just the drivel of mad men in the absence of concrete, real world facts to support it. So, extremism can go both ways.
Nah humans just hate anything different than themselves as a default. It's built-in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EoNYklyShs [youtube.com]
See now this is where my world view is advantageous: I'm not a humanist. I consider humans fundamentally emotionally flawed machines. Religions... Racism... Homo/Heterosexuality... I just end up with the Marxist worldview that it's all fetish this... class warfare that... and we're all just lazy idiotic monkeys incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. So, I don't need to tell apart the real racist and the economic racist since they all operate under the same class warfare umbrella that is triggered by the same range of emotional fetishes. And my only objective regarding this unavoidably forever-war is disarmament: There will always be people at the bottom of the class system. So the only moral position worth a damn is to make sure it's not a horrible place to live in. Everyone should have houses. Everyone should have food. Everyone's kids should have parents around watching over. Even the worst criminals should get all that.
Let the middle and upper classes fight each other for luxuries and status instead of the lower and middle classes for scraps. That's my world view. And any application of affirmative action I've read about directly went against it so I don't support it.
A bit too dramatic and edgy. But I, for one, believe calling for what most would consider extreme actions under the guise of the majority's idea of extreme world-view, should follow extreme rhetoric.
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